The New Industrial Renaissance: How Smart Manufacturing Is Rewriting Heavy Industry
- May 5
- 2 min read
Updated: May 6
ByAlexander Clausbruch, Forbes Councils Member.
for Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST | Membership
Apr 22, 2026, 09:15am EDT
Alexander Clausbruch, Radix NA CEO, enabling customers from Vision to Value with operational excellence and strong, sustainable results.
For decades, heavy industries like pulp and paper, metals and mining were viewed as relics of the industrial age. Investors increasingly shunned them; policymakers prioritized newer sectors; and the world’s attention turned toward technology and the service economy.
Manufacturing’s share of U.S. private employment has been on a steady downward trend for decades, while the sector’s contribution to GDP slipped from around 11% in 2012 to just 10% in 2024.
However, with the help of new technologies, the smokestacks are making a comeback. Technologies once thought to have left heavy industry behind—AI, contextualized data and digital twins—are now being embedded at its core.
Across more than two decades in the sector, I've watched the technologies develop and take shape that now act as nerve centers for vital centuries-old industries. Energy, chemicals, manufacturing and materials are just as critical today as they were hundreds of years ago. From what I've seen, much of today's transformation potential lies in how these industries manage their data.
Information is where the opportunity lies. However, it is also where many programs fail. Industrial companies sit on vast volumes of data, but much of it is poorly structured and locked in isolated systems. Without fixing that foundation, attempts to extract insight will falter before they get off the ground.
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